You say to me,
“don’t eat those foods, 
those chemicals
are nasty and artificial, 
your body is not made
for those…” and I eat them anyway
in full knowledge of how true
all of that is, simply because
I’m going to die anyway
and I have grown to like them.

You say to me,
“the bosses, the workers,
the system, the nature of
oppression, the means of 
production, how can you
participate…” and I agree, how
I agree from years of being
in that vise of steel, I can see all that
but I’ve still got to get paid
as long as I can because the rent is due
and I’m in need of a doctor,
because the vise
has crushed my willingness
to be afraid for righteous causes.

You say to me,
“the whiteness, the white talk,
the ignorance, the cluelessness,
the easy links between capital
and racism and patriarchy and
how can you still be here…” and
I agree, I agree, I have the arteries
and broken mind to prove it,
the slipped joints of incongruent action
and thought creak constantly under my skin
but I’m simply trying to get all the way
to death and oblivion
with as little pain as possible now.

You say to me, 
“how could you? how could you
do this, all of this…” and I agree.
I agree with your condemnation.
I do not avoid it. I do not 
defend myself from it, and 
part of the reason I’m bowing 
and laying my neck on the block today
is because the little I have left
in my power to do and say
is only going to be enough

to hold my own loathing of myself
at arm’s length for as long as it takes
to allow for my own death to be
clean and swift, a relief of burden on those
left behind to do the hard things
that I should have done back when I
was still deluded enough to believe
that working from within the vise
mattered in the slightest, and still able enough
to break free once I knew I was wrong.